


All the Unsaid Things

by TrivialPursuit



Series: Black Family Values [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blackcest, Codependency, F/M, Implied Incest, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:24:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end it was only all the unsaid things that really said anything at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Unsaid Things

They say that life's a game, and then they take the board away.

-This Vicious Cabaret, V for Vendetta

It wasn't what you said but what you didn't. How you didn't speak said far more about your relationship then a thousand hours of carefully analysed discourse ever would.

When you first were sorted into Gryffindor she glared at you, burning holes into you with the sheer intensity of her gaze. The rest of us shrunk away from her angry stare but you held it. And held it. And held it. And blinked.

Whenever you met in the halls a fight was sure to erupt. You spat hateful things at each other, things that you never meant, but neither of you ever went in for the kill, not really. Life was a game and you both played to win but if you kill one another there'd be no one left to play with. And to both of you the game was infinitely more fun then the win.

That you loved each other had never occurred to any of us. In retrospect the signs were all there, but our hormone-addled brains didn't have the finesse for the elegant dance you two engaged in almost subconsciously since the cradle.

Once I saw you together. It wouldn't have been strange except you were you and she was she. You were standing in the middle of the Entrance Hall, arms wrapped around each other, dancing to some music only you two could hear. Your foreheads were pressed together and you could barely tell when one of you ended and the other began, you were simply a collection of stark planes and angles. Watching you two I felt unbelievably filthy, your twenty minutes of dancing felt a billion times more intimate then any of the times we walked in on you and some faceless girl grappling in a secret passage or abandon classroom.

In the twenty minutes you danced not a word passed either of your lips. Then, at some seemingly random time, you split apart and depart on opposite sides of the hall, scarcely sparing each other a parting glance. And despite this lack of tangible farewell there is a reluctance to leave on both your parts.

When you got drunk you tell me about her, the girl who loves Death. 'I would have happily gone to hell and back for her. And I would have laughed the whole way.' I could see it when we talked about Lily, how you could never understand her appeal, even when the rest of us, who had never been in love, could, you never felt the tug of flashy, perfect, shiny, boring Lily Evans. You like the wild ones, the ones with fight in them, who put up resistance and don't simper and flutter. But the fight never lasts and you get bored again (She never stopped kicking).

Then we all left Hogwarts and she joined him and you joined us and lines that had previously barely existed were drawn irreversibly in the sand between us.

You met on the fields of battle often enough, yet to both of you it was still a game to be played and won and at the end the pieces picked up and the board reset. But it wasn't, not really, not anymore, not ever.

It occurs to me once when I'm sitting in some forgettable part of the world that you two were never real, your whole family was never real, or at least not in the way the rest of us are. You were like the Greek gods they told us about in Muggle Studies, broken beyond that of any human yet strangely perfect, as if nothing will ever harm you. Maybe the rest of us were closer then most to that same status, and maybe that's why we collected around you, but we were never quite there, never quite as perfectly shattered. But for you reality was boring, not worthy of your time, and, in all the time I knew you, you were never boring. Neither of you would allow it. Sometimes I'm glad that you didn't raise Harry, because for all it's charms, raising a child would have been the dullest thing in the world to you. Azkaban tore you to pieces but at least you could never be bored with her around.

Muggles say that children who grow up without love become broken, unable to cope or relate to the world outside their heads and homes. I think that's what happened to you two. Except you didn't grow up without love did you? You loved each other and we loved you and I liked to think that was enough. But you never left your head, did you? She was an extension of you, and maybe that was enough. Aristotle once said 'Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies' and I think that was you, she was the second half of your soul, the half that the rest of us could never hope to make up, the half that was ripped away from you and left to bleed more times then I can count. The half that tore away your scabs and licked at you wounds then bandaged them all back up with a kiss. I think in the end it was simply that no one ever taught you how to love and you you two never played by anyone else's rules. The line between love and hate was so blurry I often wondered if it existed at all, or if it was just one grey plane.

'I hate what you're like when you're around her,' James says at age 12 (13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22), 'She brings out the worst in you.'  
'You say that like it's a bad thing.' You laugh, tossing your head back and baring your teeth predatorily.

When you both were in Azkaban I would sometimes hear stories, stories of laughter and screams blending together to form a twisted music that echoes through the halls and floors of the forbidding prison. Because when they said that it was Azkaban that drove you insane they lied, you were always a bit of a psychopath but before you were just better at hiding it.

Sometimes, in moments made pensive by my good friend Mr Ogden, I think that the Sorting Hat made a mistake. You were both so perfectly wrong for your houses. You were loyal to the point of ambition, brave to the point of cunning. She was ambitious to the point of bravery, cunning to the point of daring, traditional to the point of loyalty.

She held more proper Gryffindor traits then the rest of us combined and you had Slytherin ones to rival Lord Voldemort himself. You were perfectly placed and so wrongly placed it was humourous. I wonder, on my more maudlin days, what would have happened if you'd switched houses. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, probably nothing would have been different. You two would both thrive in either house and the world would burn around you both in either scenario. 

Hagrid was the keeper of keys for Hogwarts, charged with protecting the secrets and students safe from unwanted attention. Likewise, we were the protectors of the Marauders and their secrets. Eventually, it was understood but never said, that when we had children these secrets would be passed on to the next generation of Marauders. Obviously, that never happened since we never really knew Harry that well and none of us knew Teddy at all. But we did not know this as James passed through middle age and the rest of us soon followed, we protected your secrets and did not ask questions. We did not talk about it because you did not talk about it. If was not our job to judge, to condemn, we were merely charged with protecting the secrets that kept the Marauders strong. She was not your Elizabeth as Lily was to James, she was your Catherine, wild, fierce, and utterly unattainable. And maybe it was better that way, maybe it was better for those secrets to simply fade away, eternally protected by all who might remember. It is better, I think, simpler; love would simply tarnish your memories, memories that are so dearly clung to by so many. If she could love a man such as you they way she did is she still a monster? And if you could love a woman such as her, are you still a good man?

People say that Black children are not valued, but anyone who's ever met a Black knows how ridiculous that is. Black children are not coddled like most children, they are not hugged and kissed and told how important and beautiful they are, in that sense they aren't loved at all, but they are prepared for the world outside, perhaps better then most children are. They might be considered maladjusted or wild, unable to be reigned in, yet they have pride, they have poise, they have cunning, and they have ambition. They are sent out into the world with all the skills they need to dominate the world around them. 

Children were never failures, they were only disappointments. Even you, who broke your mother's heart, was never a failure, whatever she might have said to you. To her you were her perfect boy, her son and heir, the first son, her brightest star; you had intelligence, backbone, and every other quality that your family prized oh-so-highly. You were not, as you so frequently tell people, your family's greatest failure, but rather their greatest triumph.

You would sit sometimes, after Harry and his friends had left, when you didn't think anyone was watching, staring at a picture of her, curling and smoothing the edges between your fingers. I believe the others assumed it was a picture of the four of us, engaged in some act of youthful devilry. But it wasn't, it was the same image that had sat under the top right corner of your mattress since fifth year, the one with just you and her, laughing as if the world was burning around you.

I realise that Kreacher saw way more then we ever attributed to him. He watched five little bundles grow into five wild children, five willful teenagers, four broken adults, three shattered hearts, and two empty shells. He keeps the little things, not only mementos of your mother, but also ones that remind him of you. The first time she walked, the first word you said, Regulus' Quidditch robes, a lock of Narcissa's first head of hair, Andromeda's baby blanket, a silver rattle with a handle of twined snakes, all five Hogwarts letters. The pictures are all moments in your lives too, baby photos, funerals, Christmases, summers, life as you knew it. He understood the little things as well, the touches, glances, slaps, glares, caresses, moans, tears, laughter. You were his children much more then you were ever Walburga or Orion or Druella or Cygnus'. He raised you, knew your bottle preferences, nap times, loves, hates, everything. And maybe that's why you hate him. He knows these things about you, knows these things that even we never knew. He remembers better then we that Sirius Black was once a child with hopes and dreams, remembers that there was something before this. Because even I forgot about you after a while, didn't I? I forgot, but then again, I never really knew you. I knew Black, Sirius, 'GRYFFINDOR!', and Mr Padfoot the Marauder but I never knew Sirius Black.

When we sit around your mother's kitchen table, no matter who was there, all I can ever see are shadows of the dead, walking dead, and almost dead racing through the halls. When I look into your eyes I know that that's all you can see too. The house is full of reminders. A baseboard that's been scratched with a heart and two letters, a burn on the ceiling, the only remainder of a prank from long ago, doors that haven't been opened since their owners left the house for one last time, a spot where the plaster's a little two new for the rest of the rest of the room, suggesting a quaffle or child's skull had once made contact.

Harry and his friends obliviously race past these memorials of halcyon days, unknowingly reenacting scenes from a play that was put on twenty years ago, slowly breaking your heart as you, the playwright and principal actor, watch your life unfold again and again before your eyes. Girls with unwieldy names and boys who've been bequeathed with crushing expectations flow through the house, falling in and out of love, breaking each other's hearts and bandaging them back together, watching the ones they love be taken away and settling for those whom they don't. You see it all, again, and again, and again.

When she killed you I wasn't a bit surprised. Sad, yes, surprised, no. We had all known that one of you would eventually end the game. You were fire and fire, and when two fires meet they rage and flame and battle for dominance. Eventually one burns the other out, creating one massive flame that is nearly unstoppable.

When you fought that last time many words were thrown about, cruel words, taunts, rebuttals, insults. But it was what wasn't said that was far more important. What you didn't say as you traded curses, what she didn't crow in delight when she won, and what she didn't scream in anguish when she finally realised that this time you couldn't just reset the board.

In the end it was only all the unsaid things that really said anything at all.


End file.
